Good thoughts. 

Challenge with channels is tension between community vs. tag.

Channels work well when they are communities. That requires a lot of time and effort. Few people want to spend the time building / managing a community.

Average user wants to use them as tags / discovery boost.

Misalignment of incentives. Partially our fault for pushing people to cast in them for a couple years.

A good question here is whether people that want to build and manage communities and incentivized to do so in any special way?

Community Builder. I'm wandering and wondering. Interested in decentralized, cool & creative stuff. Worked on a DAO for 5 years and looking for something new.

Writer, senior editor, music nerd, GenX eldergoth, monastery-bootstrapper. https://paragraph.xyz/@danicaswanson https://tinyurl.com/Black-Stone-Wordsmith

This is the pitfall of only incentivizing builders + solo posters IMHO. People who build channels should be incentivized somehow.

Agree that this is a good question. Thanks for bringing it up.

I'm one of those few people who actually does want to build and manage communities here. I've co-founded and stewarded two on FC in the past year: one in a private group chat, and one in a public channel. Both have gone well and have a core group of casters who love them, but they're also in limbo -- for two reasons:

1) lack of a sustainable economic model to support the time and labor required to bootstrap, and
2) no customizable spaces for us to carry on long-form discussions at our own (slow) pace.

Good moderation is a job just like any other, and it requires a significant time commitment (as Dan acknowledges). Until we have good options for the two issues above, the two communities I mentioned will remain in limbo, since the mods/co-founders have to turn the bulk of our attention to paid work elsewhere.